What's the worst thing you've done to a world?

Counterpart to the parallel thread for characters.

I've had worlds:

• Blinked in and out of existence and Mind Raped in various ways by a Reality Warper
• Taken over by a race of aliens who intend to replace all human minds with alien minds gradually over the course of the next couple of centuries. And the world couldn't say anything about it because the aliens made it socially unacceptable.
• Where happiness is a limited resource that can be produced by narrowly defined events, and can be traded. Furthermore, the world was undergoing a Malthusian apocalypse in terms of happiness.

I created it.

Seriously though, I think I've been pretty kind to my world. A few alien invasions here, a rogue kaiju there, a few near misses with parallel realities and planet buster weapon systems.

Few series of nasty wars...no real existential threats so far. Yet to come, I guess.

I once designed a world where you could tap Green Rocks for energy for magic, but doing so eventually depleted these crystals - and when you depleted enough crystals in an area, all animal life in the region turned into horrible monsters, plants warped into man-eaters and giant masses of thorny, leafless bramble, milk turned sour and the weather turned nasty and any people in the region caught horrible, debilitating diseases. This happened because the depleted crystals were trying to recharge their batteries by sucking the life-force from any nearby living things.

Enter an unstoppable, corrupt company bent on exploiting said crystals for profit.

I'd have probably stuck with the setting, but I realized that I had ripped off Final Fantasy VII subconsciously.

edited 8th Dec '11 10:37:49 PM by MyGodItsFullofStars

I blew it up.

That seems pretty bad, all right.

I gave a newly created nation a stupid, childish empress and an Articles of Confederation-esque constitution.

And then I realized that I basically have a post-revolution America analogue, but with an executive.

edited 9th Dec '11 4:34:54 AM by CrystalGlacia

Is there a Shay's Rebellion?

Well, I'm not really a fan of big events that happen to Earth, but I do have a Gendercide as the premise of one of my sci-fi ideas.

edited 9th Dec '11 5:01:40 AM by chihuahua0

I made the Earth the home planet of my main character. Why? Because he is more or less the personification of reality itself (not that he knows, of course), Earth is slowly becoming an intergalaxy portal airport because a lot of randomly appearing portals. The problem is that there are a race full of cosmic horror that jumps to world to world through that portal and devours every living thing on their path.

Slight relief is that the Exorcists, the international military, is freaking hardcore.

Well, having one of the world's two 'gods' abandon it to go off and fight an ancient war, only for an Eldritch Abomination to descend from the sky and to slowly corrupt the remaining 'god' as well as the world itself: the air, water & soil become contagions for The Virus, most of humanity (save those who live in the mountains, and even they're on borrowed time...) has been either wiped out or reduced to violent, infectious mutants, and even if the first 'god' returns, it may well be far too late...

Another world was conqoured effortlessly by a group of these same fanatical 'gods', who imprisoned the human species and locked them up in The Matrix-esque virtual realities: some are tormented forever and ever, others live in bizarre non-sense worlds at the whim of these fickle deities.

On a different thriving but uninhabited world, a prison ship containing a cargo of captured biomechanical monsters that can literally eat anything crash lands. The human guards and staff manage to escape offworld, but the prisoners manage to escape and burrow underground: if the humans working for ASHE give their report, ASHE will likely raze the planet from orbit, wiping out potentially billions of unique species, and if ASHE ignores it, that world will slowly be eaten from within and converted into a polluted, biomechanical Death World and used as a base of operations for a trillions strong horde of Planet Looters.

And many, many others. The Stellarum is not always a pleasant place to live.

edited 9th Dec '11 5:18:58 AM by Eventua

Allowed it to be taken over by a psychotic dictator.

Later on I just flat out destroyed it.

Not counting the specific cruelties against our own Terra, pretty much every protagonist and antagonist in my current 'verse can singehandedly destroy universes. And do. Multiple times.

In regards to Earth itself, let's see...

• Multiple major urban centers wiped off the map
• A massive World War
• Africa being completely and totally trashed after the whole region is literally blasted clean off the planet (leaving a giant, flat slag patch where the continent and a good portion of ocean used to be)
• Vaporization of a large quantity of ocean water and the burning of a fifth of the atmosphere (as a direct result of the above)
• Finally, a cataclysmic rain of molten Africa descending from on high to bring ruin to another couple dozen countries

And this is all before the world is actually destroyed. The kicker? It's all the protagonist's fault.

edited 9th Dec '11 6:33:36 AM by KSPAM

Observe. Here's a list of what that doesn't tell you:

• Manhattan has been reduced to rubble
• The sea level has increased noticeably.
• Japan is uninhabitable due to more nuclear accidents
• The euro collapsed
• There was a revolution in China that nearly bankrupted the country
• It's set in DC, and the weather has gotten even worse than it already is.

No, the empress' chancellor pulled something silent. That's my plot.

edited 9th Dec '11 12:39:19 PM by CrystalGlacia

Large-scale interdimensional warfare, involving self-proclaimed deities, their bizarre servitors, extremely powerful silicon-based aliens, old-school fairies and the usual idiots.

Think of the end of Jorge Luis Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius", only more existentially terrifying.

edited 9th Dec '11 8:36:03 AM by JHM

Gave everyone syphilis.

In the backstory: a war so violent and devastating that the world literally breaks as a result, shifting into four different planes of existence. Each one is a mostly-Crapsack World.

In the story proper: begin melding those planes of existence back together at the most inopportune time, threatening their stability and the lives of their inhabitants.

edited 9th Dec '11 4:36:46 PM by Mort08

I've found that picking out the terrible things I do cheapens their value, since they're not usually intended to be seen as a good thing even from a meta point of view.

I guess the biggest thing I can think of is When the Stars Came Crashing Down, where at the end they're faced with a choice between a 1984-style endless military conflict (well, not endless, but at least for the foreseeable future) between the superpowers... or nuking everything and attempting to start from scratch.

They choose the latter.

So far put down to page I've levied a massive interstellar war on several planets.

This is nothing compared to what I do to them in the second and third books.

Various forms of world-ending calamity. One of the major civilizations of my setting had the WMD philosophy of "one planet, one bomb". Almost entirely in the backstory, though.

Neutron irradiation is relatively quick and painless, but kills all living things down to virii. Atmospheric Ignition Weapons are basically Atmospheric Deprivation Weapons from Homeworld or one of 40k's forms of Exterminatus, and do exactly what it says on the tin by igniting the oxygen in the atmosphere (and also any water sources) via a strip-fusion reaction that continues until it's out of fuel.

Reality Distortion Munitions are more towards the horrifying end of the scale. They also do what it says on the tin, causing the breakdown of local physical laws. The chemical reactions that sustain life and the basic physical laws that hold objects and living things together are repealed. Everything is reduced to an atomic level. The process takes considerable time, up to ten minutes, and is believed to be quite painful in the initial stages. The end result is all objects, persons, and the ground itself up to the weapon's operative depth being reduced to extremely fine dust. Though practical fallout is minimal, the use of mage powers in such an area will usually be unstable for generations or even centuries after the fact, and attempts to manipulate dimensional physics cause impressive releases of energy and frequently permanent space-time distortion.

All such weapons are outlawed in the modern era. Though the modern starfaring nations have the ability to reduce a world to ash with nuclear weapons (in the case of New Belka, and with Bureau assistance Earth and Luthien), destroy it slowly over several days with orbital bombardment from a fleet (New Belka and the Bureau), or annihilate its surface over the course of a day with repeated discharges of a distortion backlash weapon like the Arc-En-Ciel (the Bureau), none of them are likely to ever actually do it. The Bureau and New Belka both bear the memory of Belka annihilating trillions of lives and thousands of planets during their fall and realize the utter folly of so doing. A life-bearing planet is a thing of incredible value. Destroying them is an act of incredible stupidity.

edited 9th Dec '11 6:56:46 PM by Night

Re the Atmospheric Ignition thing...if it's a nuclear reaction, which you imply is the case, it shouldn't be particularly troubled by molecular bonds, and oxygen is the most plentiful element in the earth's crust. If you fuse all the available oxygen, you're going to melt off the crust, at least, and possibly a good chunk of mantle as well.

In the backstory of a novel I've given up on, an interstellar war blew up a world so hard that a small portion of the forces from each side were blasted into the gap between realities. Turning them into very low-level Eldritch Abominations. Who then fed on worlds a bit.

In my current project, I've only done minor things. An Atlantis sinking, centuries of prolonged spring, possibly some Death Takes a Holiday.

That's theoretically true...

But we've actually tried to make strip-fusion weapons ourselves that worked on hydrogen in water and we couldn't make it work (thankfully). You'd need bizarre superscience just to make the concept viable, so I can basically say whatever I want.

edited 9th Dec '11 6:56:25 PM by Night

I've done atmospheric ignition before, but it was on a planet with a water equivalent that specifically chain reacts at high (like, orbital weaponry high) temperatures.

That was space opera, though, so A Million Is a Statistic is in effect, in the sense that there wasn't just one world and thus, as far as the audience would be concerned, the effect is less than if it was the only world in the setting (that mattered) and the main characters lived there...

Well, one of my series takes place a couple hundred years After the End. Some nebulous disaster that isn't fully explained happened turning huge swathes of land uninhabitable due to electric fields so strong they can make you hallucinate, drive you insane and erase your memories. People survive in various country-sized pockets, cut off from each other (probably the only way to get around them would be space travel) so each pocket is run differently and thinks its the only one. Basically though people have pretty much forgotten what happened exactly, though it's implied the Human Subspecies (Technians), who have pretty much become a separate species who rule over normal humans and are the only ones who still have advanced technology, actually did it, possibly through a war.

The humans are lead to believe however that it was a natural disaster of some kind and that the Technians saved them from extinction after the disaster (which they kind of did but since it was there fault to begin with...). They are constantly fed that they owe the Technians their lives, though most humans suspect that they are being taken advantage of. The only reason there aren't big rebellions is because for oppressors the Technians pretty much stick to themselves and really obvious abuse of humans is looked down on among them. They think of themselves as benevolent, but they are actually more neglectful, since they don't really give humans much of anything and horde most of their technology for themselves, while taking liberties like taxes of goods and all kinds of other rights, as well as all humans pretty much being their serfs, which sometimes they do take advantage of, just not enough that it's a huge outcry yet.